We scoured the library for books, since Crazy Jane reads voraciously and then gets surly when she’s out of material. Persephone hid library books in our luggage for periodic surprises, but that just made Jane insist, “I need to get out another library book now!” She started in on one book as soon as she took it off the shelf and, by the time we finished our browsing, checked out, and changed Jerome’s pants, she had finished it. As we drove out of the parking lot I asked if we should return it in the book drop we were driving past.
My plan was to be in Hays, Kansas, by 3:30. Instead, we stopped for dinner at an IHOP in Salina at 5:00. There were two parties of old people who were just finishing their meal, and us. The rest of the place was empty. Things were so slow that they had TWO greeters. We placed our order and then waited forever for our food. Twenty minutes later a tour bus pulled up and the workers went into pandemonium. There were still at least 100 empty seats. Jerome figured out how to escape a restaurant high chair. We were back on the road two hours later, finally reaching Hays after 8:00.
I took the older kids swimming while Persephone tried to get Jerome asleep. After a lengthy swim, showers, and watching the end of a baseball game on television, Jerome wasn’t asleep and the other two kids thought “Don’t say another word for the rest of the night” was merely life advice to be disregarded as soon as necessary. I took them down to the lobby and read their books to them (Forecasting the Weather for Joe, and Anne of Green Gables for Jane) until nearly midnight, when Jerome was finally asleep.
Things got better the next morning, sort of like how Han rescues Luke in the middle of The Empire Strikes Back, relieving some of the buzz-harshing while paradoxically enhancing the harshing to come. We were up by 6:00, at breakfast by 6:30, and out the door by 7:00. And since we were heading west, we were gaining an hour when, a little later in the day, we passed from Central Time to Mountain Time. Things also got much better (for me, at least) when I started getting new counties.
We spent the morning driving through rural western Kansas, listening to Laura Linney’s reading of the Nancy Drew book, The Bungalow Mystery. (The bungalow has only a tenuous connection to the plot. If I were the Stratemeyer fellow who ran the whole production, I would have called it, The Mysterious Guardians.) We drove through Two Buttes, Colorado, where Persephone killed my plan to have us stand next to the town sign, mooning the camera (the great thing about extremely rural places is the myriad opportunities for spontaneous nudity), despite the fact that she’s never mooned a camera before in her life. (The same cannot be said of me.)
After a lunchtime experience with some Amish at the McDonald’s in Lamar, Colorado, we drove on. When we finally saw mountains, near Walsenburg, our kids were sufficiently impressed. Jane said of the Spanish Peaks, “The look like they’re made out of plastic,” and Joe said, “That’s the hugest mountain ever!”
We stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park. It wasn’t part of our plan, but we had made good time all day and had several hours until sunset yet. I had done some reading about Great Sand Dunes, and was aware that it was full of sand dunes, but not one thing I read made mention of the stream that runs between the access road and the sand dunes. Evidently I was the only one who didn’t get the memo, because most of the park visitors were in bathing suits, playing in the stream. We forded the stream and hiked on the dunes. Joe was unexpectedly ecstatic, leading the way towards the dune he wanted to climb and slide down.
Sliding didn’t work so well, so I rolled down, like every self-respecting Mormon has done at the Manti Temple. I got very dizzy and nearly puked, much to the delight of our kids.
Of course, we became unbelievably sandy. So much so that, three washes later, the clothes we were wearing still have sand in the pockets and cuffs. But we had a good time and we all got more stamps for our national parks passports. And I managed to beat the sand off our kids’ feet without scrubbing the skin off, which was something that happened so regularly when we frequented the beach as a child that I assumed it was a necessity. It turns out, it’s not necessary at all.
Things went downhill when we reached our hotel in Alamosa. Persephone was supposed to get Jerome asleep while I swam with the kids. But the hotel pool was small and had nearly no area under four-feet deep. On top of that there were, by actual count, 19 people in the pool: three adults and 16 kids. Half of the kids were busy incessantly jumping in the pool, creating splashes that the pool deck was not designed to handle, resulting in enormous puddles against every wall. Their adult proudly told the other, “They did this for an hour last night.” One of his kids didn’t know how to swim, so would sink to the bottom, push off with his feet to resurface, and repeat, slowly hopping his way to the stairs. Once out, he singled out a particular kid NOT FROM HIS GROUP and tried repeatedly to jump on that kid’s head. That is no hyperbole. He wasn’t merely trying to splash the other kid, or jumping really close for fright. He was jumping with his legs open, trying to land on the kid’s neck and ride him under the water. After enough dirty looks from me to his adult, the guy told the kind, “Garrett, not so close.” (If it weren’t for these kids and their negligent adults, the story of the pool would have been the woman in the bikini with the sagging stomach flab hanging over the waistband of her Budweiser-logo-bedazzled jean shorts.)
Later, while reading in the lobby to the older kids, the staff of the hotel was friendly, but a little TOO friendly. One woman asked if we needed anything. I said, “No, we’re just reading while our other kid falls asleep.” Five minutes later she came back and said, “The TV’s on in the dining area if the kids want to watch cartoons.” Did she think we were only reading because we didn’t know where to find a TV? Hotel TV is like crack to my kids, who are so TV-deprived, what with our lack of cable, that they happily watch infomercials at hotels. I got to incur their wrath by telling them that we were going to continue reading.
1 comments:
I wish you would have taken a picture of the woman in the bedazzled beer shorts.
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